perfidy

Yesterday I left work early so the grunting men could move my office, came home, and got savagely depressed on half a glass of cheap wine and a private screening of The Big Lebowski.

A man's home is his castle, and yesterday the Supreme Court named them all Ruby Ridge. The Truth Laid Bear (linked) has aggregated a number of reactions to the Kelo case. Here's mine: The very notion that anyone's home - anyone's - is now up for grabs as long as a state or muncipal government thinks there might possibly be some potential gain in tax earnings to be had by tearing that home down, makes me want to puke. This session of the Supreme Court has really beefed a couple in a row here; between Raich and Kelo, I figure my best bet is to buy my own island and build a house there. That, or come up with a few billion dollars and move to a kleptocracy.

Eugene Volokh has argued (presumably rightly, he's a smart dude) that Kelo merely articulates or sums up recent trends in property law and therefore isn't anything new. True. But as Glenn Reynolds has observed, sometimes it takes an incident like this to open people's eyes to how deranged a situation has become. Take the aforementioned Ruby Ridge - before that awful standoff and Waco not long after, Americans who weren't already survivalist types had no idea that the US government could operate that way. Now every American above a certain age remembers what happened and knows somewhere deep inside in that place where you get nervous at traffic stops not to trust the guys in bad suits and aviator shades.

How can Kelo end well for anyone? The Republicans need to work pretty hard to distance themselves from this opinEyion, in which three out of five Justices in the majority were appointed by Republican presidents. Anyone that Bush nominates for the Court will (hopefully) have to distance themselves from the body's recent statist excesses. In the short term, it's possible that the housing market might come in for a shock as people realize that the deed to their house no longer counts for much. In the long term, I think we will probably see a few emboldened and outraged neighborhoods in standoffs with authorities. Either way, not good to say the least. Our liberty is a shockingly fragile thing when you stop to think about it, and days like yesterday make it seem like we're close to the edge.

Come for my house, and they'll have to call the 5 o'clock news and the National Guard. That's a g-d d-mn promise. All the dude ever wanted was his rug back, and all most people ever want is to be left the hell alone. In their house.